Daniel Röhn – The Golden Violin (Trailer)

“The golden twenties” – it’s a time that I am very fond of: style and beauty – a bit too much sometimes. Everything was done with such excess and and no inhibitions. Look at the cars of that time! How did people build a house and how did they dress? Everyone had a certain level of style. The quality of film music of that time, I mean my god silent films, the music had to be so convincing and so capturing because nobody could speak. Everything was underlined with music as it is today of course in film, but it had to play such a strong role. “Metropolis” is a gigantic monsters movie. It’s one of the most important in film history and it starts with, you can read it on the screen, it’s like an epigram and it says the mediator between the head and hands must be the heart! Isn’t that fantastic?! Who would say that nowadays?!? I was trying to think about this during recording because it’s
exactly what we do. When I saw “Metropolis” for the first time I thought “who wrote this music” this is incredible! Was it Schönberg or Wagner or Strauss, probably a combination of all these – no, it was Gottfried Huppertz … … never heard of him and nobody has but this is I mean it’s the same league, very often. It’s phenomenal! I have such admiration for this orchestra. To do this the right way is so difficult. Being American we were kind of baptized in all this Gershwin and Bernstein and all of these different
kind of jazz pieces. The combination here is so funny with case American, New Yorker. Daniel brings something really interesting to this music in the sense that obviously he’s German he’s got this
wonderful German sound but an incredible sense for the jazz and the swing of the era. It wouldn’t be right to call them the backup band in this case because there’s so much tapestry particularly you know in jazz music. Of course there’s a lot of free rubato I was just astounded that on a dime they can swing. You know with this sort of repertoire and I immediately think of a violin I cannot help but hear … a violin. It’s, you know, when you watch an old movie like a black-and-white movie and there is a love scene or something there’s always a violin playing. This repertoire would be very often underestimated both in quality and in execution. The fact that you can put so many of these gorgeous melodies and tunes into you know so it’s
a short amount of time is priceless. It’s basically one after the other they’re all hits!